Why Did Our Jewish Ancestors Leave a Great Place Like the Pale?

Date & Time:  Wed, Oct 4, 2023 at 7:00 - 8:30 PM ET

Location:  Zoom

Register Now . . . registration ends at midnight ET on Tues, Oct 3rd (the night before event).

Program:  Jews were welcomed into the Polish principalities in the 1200s, most notably, by the Duke of Greater Poland, Bolesław the Pious. Thousands fleeing persecution and expulsions across Western Europe came.  As Poland expanded to the east and south, Jews moved into Lithuanian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian lands.  By 1800 there were more than a million Jews in the Pale. By 1900, they would number nearly five million. Jews flourished in the Pale, creating diverse religious, cultural, educational, and charitable institutions. Then, between 1881 and 1914 over two million left all that they had known for the West.  This talk discusses how the Pale came to be, life in it and why this mass migration occurred. It breaks the 120-year history of the Pale into periods of creation, confinement, repression, enlightenment, pogroms, and chaos. There is much more to the story than the horrific pogroms at the turn of the 20th century.

Speaker:   Hal Bookbinder is a retired information systems professional who continues to instruct at the university level. He has been actively researching his genealogy for more than three decades, identifying over 4,000 relatives and tracing two lines to the mid-1700s in modern Ukraine. He is a past president of the JGS of Los Angeles and of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies. Hal publishes a series of monthly articles on safe computing which are freely available at http://www.tinyurl.com/SafeComputingArticles. He and his wife, Marci, were raised in the Catskills of New York State, in the famed “Borsht Belt”. After attending New York University and a four-year stint in the US Air Force, they have lived in the Los Angeles area. In 2018, he made a journey to Ukraine, visiting various areas of the former Volhynia and Podolia in which his family lived for hundreds of years.

Registration:  Required and free.  A zoom link will be emailed to you the day before the program.  Registration ends at midnight ET on Tuesday, Oct 3rd (the night before event).

A recording of this program will be available in the Member section of our website.  For information on membership, click HERE.